Kateryna Lisunova
One of the biggest problems with Tucker Carlson and many of these bloggers spreading russian propaganda for money is that the average viewer simply cannot believe someone would lie so blatantly and directly to their audience. Instead, people look for an explanation or a hidden motive. Even when the evidence is overwhelming, many convince themselves that their favorite commentator just made an honest mistake. “Maybe they just don’t know what I know,” they think. An honest mistake is easy to forgive. But that’s exactly the trap. Most people struggle to accept that someone they trust could knowingly lie to them, straight to their face. Yet that’s precisely what propagandists do. Another common technique is the “70/30 rule.” They present 70% accurate information mixed with 30% lies or propaganda. That’s what makes it so effective. You think, “But everything else they said is true.” And that’s exactly what they want you to believe. By mixing facts with carefully crafted falsehoods, they make the lies much harder to recognize - and much easier to accept. But the main goal is always to plant those 30% seeds in your head.
Max 📟
Tucker Carlson and Iza Bendianishvili (“Elizabeth Lane”) make a bizarre allegation: NATO secretly ran a bot army of "500,000 or something trolls, bots" out of Ukraine. Bendianishvili then describing a published study that found the exact opposite. Turns out that NATO StratCom bought engagement from manipulation vendors to test whether Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram would catch it. (They didn't.) They paid €300 for the study, which ended up with 3,530 comments, 25,750 likes, 20,000 views and 5,100 followers. And then a report came out identifying that almost all of the manipulation vendors were located in Russia. The bots were pro-Russia! All of this is public information that became available in 2019. There were articles about it.